Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  The winter skies in the coastal part of Northern California are often clouded over or shrouded in fog, but driving back from one of Ginny’s last dental appointments on January 2, 1974, they caught a glimpse of the comet Kohoutek for four minutes just after sunset, just over a cloud bank. And that was the last of relatively clear skies they had for a while. The next day, January 3, 1974, at about noon, the power went out over the entire area. And stayed out, day after day.

  Winters around Monterey Bay tend to be rainy, rather than snowy, but without heating it gets very chilly. As the heat drained out of the house they moved into the living room, where they could use the Swedish fireplace. Robert wore a parka over layers of shirts and pants, over pajamas, while Ginny got out her Gore-Tex “Alaska pants.” They brought in firewood, kerosene lamps, and sterno for their camping stove. Ginny cleared out the freezer and put a big iron pot of stew on the fireplace. By the fourth day, their firewood was running low. Fortunately, the telephone was still functioning, and they were able to order in another cord delivered. It was still piled on the front steps when the power came back on, after 124 hours and a bit, though the lights were flickering and the power supply not constant for yet more days. Stacking the cordwood gave them both backaches. The greenhouse was completely dead. Then there were decayed freezer contents to dispose of, and cleaning and disinfecting—and load after load of laundry.

  They were so far behind they had to work doubletime to be ready to leave on February 4, 1974, for a now really much-needed vacation, a month aboard the ship Mariposa for a South Sea cruise. In fact, they missed Mariposa’s sailing date from San Francisco even though Robert worked fifty-two hours straight at the typewriter (on the documentation for the English copyright infringement matter) and had only a four-hour nap before they left the house. They were able to arrange a flight to catch up with Mariposa in Honolulu.37

  They thoroughly enjoyed the cruise time, dancing every night, wonderful food, and an abundance of parties including dress-up and costume parties in which Robert took boyish delight. Ginny came to the Hat Party as Carmen Miranda, with real tropical fruit (heavy and awkward). At another costume party, they got an honorable mention when Robert came as the Ambassador from Arcturus in metallic green greasepaint and white dinner clothes, bearing Ginny as a Playboy Bunny on his arm. Robert spent as much time as he could in his favorite occupation—talking—or girl-watching by the pool. Ginny said she was a “shipboard alcoholic” since she rarely drank at home, and she engaged in some strenuous activities to keep her figure: dance classes, appearing in an amateur abridgement of South Pacific, and dancing in the chorus in a variety show on the way back. Robert played “pirate” in the King Neptune ceremonies crossing the Equator, harrassing the “pollywogs” at King Neptune’s bidding.

  This was their first visit to many of the South Sea Islands, and also their first actual contact with many of the Polynesian island cultures whose anthropology Heinlein had for decades been raiding for his fiction. The islands they found exotic and glamorous—but more dirty and squalid than they had expected. In Papeete, the main city on Tahiti, Robert bought Ginny a daring dress in shades of green that almost covered her standing, but slithered apart when she sat, scandalizing any jaybirds in the neighborhood. They visited Moorea, Rarotonga, and Samoa, too.

  Unpleasant memories of their 1954 travels in Australia and New Zealand almost kept them on the ship, but Heinlein did go ashore in Auckland. Reporters were on the ship literally as soon as they docked, and Robert found himself giving newspaper interviews and submitting to be photographed before having his morning coffee. The invitations began to pour in. He gave a telephone interview on Radio I. Fans actually came on board the ship and sent gifts—quite overwhelming. They had very little time left to see anything of Auckland (but did get to the zoo).

  The performance was repeated in Sydney, almost beat for beat—(and when they got to Fiji on the way back to Hawaii, they found waiting for them a package. On Auckland radio he had talked about meeting a baby elephant named Kashin at the zoo there and mentioned the elephant charm he used to tape to his wrist for fencing and which he had lost in 1930. One youngster had expressed him a tiny plastic elephant as a replacement!).

  They left Mariposa at Honolulu and flew to Los Angeles, arriving after midnight on March 7, to be met by a passel of boisterous Cal-Tech students and ferried to the campus to speak at a seminar. They had hoped for a visit to JPL, but they were so much in demand that it was out of the question. And then, abruptly, they were home again, with just enough time to wade through the accumulation of mail before going off to Heinlein’s forty-fifth reunion at Annapolis.

  Time Enough for Love was nominated for a Nebula Award, up against Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama: the very complex and experimental poised against a book extraordinarily retro, with nearly all story structure sacrificed to mood. Heinlein didn’t see the Science Fiction Writers of America honoring him with a Nebula under any circumstances whatever,38 which made a win for Rama inevitable this year.

  When it was suggested he might accept the award on behalf of his longtime friend—since Clarke, for a wonder, was not on an American speaking tour this April—Heinlein furnished himself with an extra copy of Rama to take to the awards banquet in Los Angeles.

  Keynote and acceptance speeches at a Nebula Awards banquet can be a very mixed lot. This year, in the era of the Club of Rome report,39 almost all were downbeat and depressing, even with the ever-entertaining Robert Bloch as toastmaster. As Heinlein was called to the podium to accept for Clarke, Ginny slipped him a note, “Give them hope,” and so he opened his remarks with Pandora’s Box and tried to find something cheerful to say about the future. Accepting the Nebula Award for Rama, he got all his colleagues to autograph it so he could send it as a souvenir to Clarke in Sri Lanka.

  One colleague Robert had particularly looked forward to meeting at this Nebula Award banquet was Philip K. Dick. Dick was a long-established writer Heinlein had routinely kept an eye on because he was doing some interesting, though often uneven, experimental work. While they were away, Dick had written him a surprisingly shy and almost inarticulate fan letter:

  I am trembling as I write this, to address a letter to you, and I see that my typewriter itself is laboring under the weight of what I want to say but probably will not be able to. When you entered the science fiction field it was an infantile field, written so and appealing so. Those days are gone forever and because of you. You made our field worthy of adult readers and adult writers. I have long wanted to tell you that I know this, but I’ve been blocked in saying so; I don’t know why. Perhaps there are some persons that one admires so much that one cannot even manage to express admiration—at least aloud. But my admiration for you and my enjoyment of your work has been in my heart for many years, unsaid. I want to say it now.40

  Dick’s Hugo-winning novel The Man in the High Castle (1962—the year after Stranger had won) was, he said, a “thinly veiled encomium” to Heinlein.41 Heinlein wrote Dick a long letter of thanks and encouragement42 and brought copies of some of Dick’s books to Los Angeles. Heinlein asked Dick for autographs—which seemed to nonplus Dick.

  The trip to Annapolis was coming up at the end of May, and to New York thereafter. In addition to his promise to give a talk at the Poetry Center at the Ninety-second Street YW-YMHA (Young Women’s-Young Men’s Hebrew Association), the National Rare Blood Club wanted him to speak at a banquet on June first, so he would be quite busy this trip. The Poetry Center was already publicizing the event, and Neil Schulman wrote that they were likely to meet Alexei Panshin there—a prospect they both viewed with distaste.

  The reunion was leisurely this year, with parties each night, drinking and dancing too late. Ginny was excluded from some of the functions, but she did get to tour the facilities and saw that the Academy was now maintaining computer data storage for each of the midshipmen, on a vacuum tube computer they were timesharing with the Navy.43

  Saturday, the second day o
f the reunion, they spent the afternoon sailing on the bay with Bob Kephart,44 a small-boat enthusiast and energetic shiphandler who kept one rail or the other underwater so much of the time Robert said it was the only tall-masted submarine he had ever seen. They were late in getting back and covered with salt spray, and so missed dinner. In fact, they were permanently behind schedule after that and missed breakfast and lunch on Sunday.

  In New York, they had several days at the Tuscany, to see friends and transact business. Richard Pope, an editor for Encyclopedia Britannica, contacted Heinlein through Blassingame to write a short article on the physicist Paul Dirac for the 1975 Compton Yearbook—an interesting project, since he had wanted to do some “catching up” in the sciences anyway, and Heinlein regarded Dirac as one of the greatest mathematical physicists of all time. The fee was relatively small, but the perks made it very desirable anyway: A full set of the new EBIII. He accepted the assignment and went off to give a television interview about the National Rare Blood Club for the midday show and attend two other functions—a business lunch at L’Argenteuil with Blassingame and Robert Gleason and on to the Poetry Center at the Ninety-second Street Y, where they were fussed over by an elderly poetess who didn’t quite know what to make of this science-fiction writer foisted on her.

  Heinlein had not prepared a speech specifically for this occasion, since they would want him to talk about writing, and the freelance writing portion of the Forrestal Lecture would do for that purpose.45 After the formal speech, he and the “hardcore fans” who remained retreated to a nearby room that had been set up with a table so he could autograph books, as at a bookstore signing. At one point, Panshin did try to introduce himself, but Heinlein refused to speak with him, saying just “Goodbye, sir!” several times and actually turning away.

  This incident, mysterious to most of the fans who were present, and regarded as so minor by the Heinleins that neither of them mentioned it in correspondence, was written up in fanzines and discussed at tiresome length as “The Shoot-Out at the Poetry Center”46—which could only have reinforced Heinlein’s already low opinion of the social standards of organized science-fiction fandom.

  While in New York, the Heinleins had habitually given “at-home parties” at the Tuscany Hotel, which had become their favorite home-away-from-home there. Two days after the Poetry Center, the Heinleins gave one of their “at-homes” with Herman Kahn and his family as guests of honor. The next day they moved to the Waldorf-Astoria. The National Rare Blood Club had furnished them with a suite in the same hotel where the banquet was being held that evening (June 1). The notice Heinlein had put into I Will Fear No Evil, publicizing the National Rare Blood Club had, he understood, doubled the donor base—a public-spirited achievement of which he was proud.

  The suite at the Waldorf was staggeringly luxurious—as large as their entire house. The bathroom alone was the size of their living room—and had a huge crystal chandelier of its own. The Associated Health Foundation gave a small cocktail party in the suite before the banquet, and Robert and Ginny were introduced to Harry Hershfield,47 who would be MC’ing that evening at the banquet. Hershfield was best known for his appearances on the Can You Top This? and Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One radio shows in the 1940s, but Robert remembered reading his newspaper comic strips in 1913. At the age of eighty-nine, Hershfield was frail and wheeled around by nurses, but lively and witty and entertaining. He obviously knew his audience, too: Later he told Heinlein a string of dirty stories during dinner—some Heinlein hadn’t heard before.

  There were twelve hundred people at the banquet, all seated at their tables before they brought in the speakers. As Robert and Ginny came in and made their way to the table, the band struck up “Anchors Away,” and everyone rose and applauded. Gradually it dawned on Robert that the ovation was for him, that he was not just one of the guest speakers tonight, but the principal honoree: He was being recognized as “Humanitarian of the Year.” While he was still dazed, a spotlight picked out Ginny in black formal dress and jewels, and they presented her with a “gangster-size” sheaf of red roses, and Ginny cried. The program was a “This Is Your Life”–type presentation of Robert’s life, with a large, blown-up photo—and an elegant, engraved glass presentation plaque.

  When it was Robert’s turn to speak, he told them how he had happened to place the notice in I Will Fear No Evil—and then fell ill and had his own life saved by five anonymous rare blood donors, and that the credit for this honor should go equally to the editors and publishers who got and kept that notice before the public—and he found in the audience and introduced Ejler Jakobsson, the editor of Galaxy; Blassingame; Walter Minton of Putnam’s, with the editor Bill Targ; Targ’s assistant Dorothy Rudo; and Col. Steve Conland, the president of Berkley Books.

  The crush around the podium when the ceremony was over was overwhelming—more, even, than Robert’s trick memory for names could keep up with. They adjourned to the suite for another party. “You need to have people around to help you climb back down from those high points, you know.”48

  The buzz was scarcely off three days later when Robert performed his last scheduled chore in New York—a taping for WOR radio of an interview with Patricia McCann for the National Rare Blood Club—and came back to earth and domestic matters in Santa Cruz. There was the usual accumulation of mail, including a big cardboard box with Ginny’s birthday present for Robert this year—now too conspicuous to hide, so she presented it a month early: She had had a thirty-inch Mars globe made up from the Mariner 9 survey photos.

  That June Robert enrolled them both in astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s new Institute of Noetic Sciences, listing Ginny’s experience with parapsychological concerns “enough to make her very receptive, none of evidential value by the strict rigor of methodology required for science.” His own?

  None of any evidential value to anyone else … [sic] but quite a bit of strong evidential value to me. Examples: Ginny and I make limited use of telepathy between ourselves. I have both experienced and seen some minor telekinesis. I have had numerous and surprisingly accurate forerunners as to my own future. I have, on several occasions, been aware of deaths of persons close to me before the news reached me through ordinary channels—and on three of those occasions the event involved death by accident of persons in good health. I have encountered idiots-savants with “wild talents.” And none of this is worth a hoot as scientific evidence.49

  Ginny was having a run of forerunners: She would periodically get an intuition of an earthquake, which happen frequently enough in California to make a good test case. Robert encouraged her to write them down on three-by-five cards and seal them in an envelope. Her forerunners were surprisingly accurate as to timing and magnitude—for earthquakes in the news as well as those they experienced locally—though the information she got about the earthquake was almost uselessly variable.

  A few of Ginny’s prediction cards were preserved in the Heinlein Archive at UC Santa Cruz, along with items like Cal Laning’s attempts to transmit telepathically while at sea during World War II. Heinlein might have closed out his teenaged Quest, with Laning and Allan Gray, in the 1930s, but he maintained a lifelong interest in disowned facts and the reality behind the reality that they represented.

  26

  MR. SCIENCE

  The Dirac article occupied him all the summer of 1974, punctuated by concerns over his family’s medical condition. His oldest brother, Lawrence, was frail though in no immediate danger, and Rex was at Letterman hospital breathing bottled oxygen. Bam fell again in June 1974. She fell again in July and broke the other hip (she had broken her right hip in a fall five years previously). She was in a convalescent hospital as a temporary solution, but she seemed to have lost contact with reality, inhabiting the world of her extreme youth. This hospital was appallingly dirty, careless, and understaffed—Bam had been allowed to fall again—and so Mary Jean was considering a permanent placement in a better facility, since it was not likely she would ever be able to
come home. Ginny instructed their tax attorney to be prepared to take the full payment for the new convalescent home in Duarte as a deduction on their taxes that year.

  Robert spent most of his time catching up on developments in physics since his days in high school. Dirac’s antimatter led to quantum mechanics and speculative physics, and he found that the old nature-of-time argument that had been the hot topic when he was in high school was still going on. The players had different names, but J. W. Dunne’s serial time thesis and Ouspensky’s six-dimensional spacetime were still around, modified and cloaked in the lingo of quantum mechanics as “The Wheeler-Everett Many Worlds Hypothesis.”

  The Humanitarian Award was bearing additional fruit, too. Now that he was an “Authority,” Heinlein’s suggestion for a blood sciences article for the Britannica was quickly taken up by Mr. Pope, who commissioned a “rare blood” article for the 1976 Compton Yearbook.1 At about that time, Heinlein was contacted by a Canadian hematologist, Denis Paradis, who wanted to put a Heinlein quote—Lazarus Long’s definition of a zygote from Time Enough for Love—into his Atlas of Immunohaematology, a reference work that would be used by clinical researchers at the highest levels of blood science. Heinlein granted the permission, of course, adding “and besides, Lazarus may have stolen it himself—he would.”2 Paradis was a Heinlein fan as well as an authority in the blood field. He would be a valuable asset, since Robert had already decided to take the entire next year off to research blood science.

  … the principle article on “Blood” in EncBrit is by C. Lockard Conley, M.D., head of hematology division at Johns Hopkins … it is an excellent article, packed with information, with no attempt to be entertaining.